The Family of Max Desir

by Robert Ferro

  He experienced some guilt momentarily. Louella was black, older, in his mother’s employ. But the taboos, fear of reprisal, or disease, lasted only as long as it took for the voluptuary in him to catalog the pleasures of the experience—the heat and silkiness, the scent, the excitement. It was Louella who showed him the power and directness of sex; Louella who took with her, besides Max’s cherry, one of his horse figurines, as a memento of the affair—the one he had thrown away and retrieved—and which he only missed later.

  That same summer he found his uncle Dan’s war souvenirs in the attic, in a dusty untouched box marked Private and shoved deep under the eave. It contained two German lugers and a small black pistol—all unloaded; folded flags, a black saucepot helmet with a silver spike in the top, swastika armbands and odds and ends; also Vargas calendars and girlie books that filled Max with excitement, not for the pictures so much as for the palpable, twenty-years-gone passion they, had evoked in his soldier-uncle.

  He brought his friend Scott up to the attic to show him the find. Together, rummaging further, they found another carton under the eave. This contained an empty bombshell of brass, letters, pictures—one of himself as a baby and with the inscription My pet on the back in his aunt Phoebe’s hand—and a Purple Heart, in a purple box lined with ivory silk.

  A Purple Heart, Scott said. This was a serious soldier.

  Also more pinups and a gynecology textbook that fell open to certain pages. The attic was not insulated. It was early summer. The sweat broke out on their brows, under their arms. Down at the bottom of the carton were two yellowed German magazines and another in English that they took out to a cooler part of the attic, near the oxeye in the gable. They lay down on a double mattress ‘on the floor to read them. It seemed expedient, halfway through, to wrestle. Over the pretext of turning a page or rereading a passage, Scott pushed him aside. Max pushed him back. They needed to manifest this new sensation immediately, force against force. Scott pinned him, but in such a way as to underscore his dominance. Max was held captive. Scott scissored his legs around Max, lying along his side, their faces almost touching. One deft wrestler’s trick and Scott had a free hand. With it he undid Max’s belt, pulled his pants down around his knees, jerked him off. Max struggled throughout. That was how it was done. Afterward he felt weak. He thought, This weakens me, strengthens him.

  On another occasion, the wrestling was more cursory, not because Max didn’t try but because the outcome was certain. This time Scott came as well, holding it in his foreskin until he could stand up. Then making a quick turn of his hips, he released himself, and with a sound like a knock at the door, his semen hit the hollow attic wall.

  IN CERTAIN YEARS SEVERAL BIG STORMS came in the same season, before the leaves fell and after the sun had faded down. Six willows in the park were blown down one year in a gale that followed three days of rain. This was the storm that took the big oak in back, an ash on the side by the fence and two of the lindens in front. A brand-new 1952 Buick Roadmaster was in the garage. The oak, which was very old and eight or ten feet around, swayed back and forth, toward them then away, as they watched at the windows waiting for it to topple. It was mid-afternoon and storm dark, with brilliant white flashes of lightning and huge surprise cracks of thunder that made Max’s neck sink down in his shoulders. The earth at the base of the tree split and heaved. Either the house or the garage and car would get it because the tree rocked on a single axis between them. The ash went, meanwhile, with first a crack as if it had snapped in half, then a long falling swish down to a thump that rocked the house and flattened the fence. Max watched from his window with openmouthed wonder, there being no difference in the spectacle before him than if it had extended to the whole world. When the lights went, it added a new dimension to the terror, as if the storm had somehow got into the house.

  It was the garage that took the big oak finally, if not completely. At the property line another oak, nearly as large, caught it as it fell, sparing the new Buick and the next house beyond. It was in all the county papers as an arboreal miracle. From the next day on a heavy smell of earth and resin filled the yard. He climbed up on the oak trunk as if onto the back of a huge dead thing fallen from the sky. The man from the insurance company walked around shaking his head, disavowing any responsibility. They would fix the garage, which was insured, but not remove the tree. It was the first time Max heard the expression, Act of God, as if God, at least for these moments, had accounted for His whereabouts.

  Fine, John said, you fix the roof first and then I’ll remove the tree, and clapped his hands together once.

  It took weeks for it to be cleared away. A large crater in the lawn between the house and the garage marked where the oak had stood. Talk of digging it out and putting in a swimming pool came to nothing. A piece of the tree trunk, which was cut and lowered in sections by rope, fell sixty feet and crushed their swing, looping the crossbar down to the ground so that a large M was formed. The swing was not replaced. It seemed that that part of their lives was over.

  In that same year—1952—John lost his job. Life was apparently too complicated for a mild little liver tonic and the company went bankrupt. Then Grandpa and Grandma Defilippo died, Danilo of stomach cancer and Angela not long afterward of congestive drowning after heart failure. Max saw her coffin lurch up onto the pallbearers’ shoulders in a way that must, he thought, have moved the body inside. Sometime after that Marie miscarried in an early month of her fifth pregnancy and went into menopause, a fact Max didn’t learn until he was past thirty. He discovered his mother one afternoon sitting in her room, her faced flushed, with a tired, pleading expression in her eyes. He asked her what was wrong and she said, I guess I miss my mother, darling. But her mother had been dead for many years. Then she said, After I had Penny I lost a baby. I was just thinking who it might have been.

  Apparently they lived for a time on what the dress shop brought in, which wasn’t much when divided between the two families. John began several projects at home. One provided people with diagrams for the landscaping of their new suburban homes, for the construction of which, usually, the ground had been strip-mined. This was an idea that came with a short correspondence course. Using clear plastic forms, he drew pencil designs of shrubs and treetops, like stylized blossoms; these he placed, in various orders and sizes, around the drawn foundations of his clients’ split-level houses. Another project was the development and production in the basement of a rust-proof paint, which he called Jemm, after the first initials of himself, Marie, and Dee’s parents, Ellen and Myron. Perhaps some of the profits from the dress shop, which they jointly owned, were put into the Jemm idea. They sat around the dining room table on Sundays after Mass; John ran the meeting and they went over the books, usually but not always without incident.

  Weekdays the house was empty when Max got home. One afternoon he came in and found Penny lurking halfway up the stairs, where the banister joined the ceiling in a V. Her hair was flaming orange. Help me she said. Max pedaled his bike to Calloway’s to buy the antidote color. No one noticed at dinner. On a similar afternoon she taught him how to smoke cigarettes. It startled him to realize that she, whom he had so protected, learned such things before he did.

  In 1956, rather in the nature of a breakthrough, and just as Robin was going off to college, John was hired as assistant production manager for a national cosmetics company. His salary was eighteen thousand dollars a year—a fortune. Within a year he was made manager of the eastern division. He worked long hours and was irritable at dinner. Max remembers his mother looking up the table, slapping down a spoon and saying, John, would your face crack if you smiled? Another time, they opened their napkins and each found a hundred dollar bill inside, which, however, they did not get to keep. The lesson involved was purely visual. John bought a long black Cadillac, which the neighbors came over to touch. Jack went from college to law school. In 1958 John was made vice-president in charge of eastern production, at twenty-four thousand a year. He work
ed sixteen-hour days, was seldom seen, hated his boss and developed an ulcer.

  John had done it only for the money and now he saw that he had enough. The dress shop was sold and with this, his savings and money raised among the Desiderios in exchange for shares, John quit his job and bought a small bankrupt paint company in Passaic. They called the company Jemm Products. Within six months of his resignation, the cosmetics company asked him to return at his own price. Allegedly, their production was off 17 percent. John was gratified by the decline, but refused.

  Jemm did moderately well from the first but in 1959 Jack was in his last year at law school and both Robin and Max were in college—Robin as a senior and Max as a freshman. The next year Jack was finished but now Penny, having declined the idea of college, went off to a kind of secretarial-finishing school that specialized in the production of air hostesses, and was even more expensive than Robin’s smart Catholic college in Philadelphia. Penny took courses in Makeup and Carriage, and the Preparation of Short Meals.

  In high school Max had had two or three major girl friends, of the type and class that precluded sex until just after or perhaps before the prom. The senior prom was like a mock mass wedding. His friend Scott, with whose body he had wrestled in the attic, was the king of the prom. Subsequently he married the queen, by whom he had four children and was never heard from again. It was Scott who showed Max how a human teenager was supposed to behave, which is to say the actions if not the precise feelings. These remained beyond Max. He had sex with no one but himself, in the afternoons when Marie was at the dress shop, his father at work and Penny at cheerleading practice. Looking out the window of his room, his rocklike penis in his hand, he watched members of the track team jog by on their way to the park. Once he brought his girl friend Milly home with him. They had petted heavily on countless dates, kissed passionately; he had even put his hand inside her moist panties and fingered her. The problem was that she was too tight to fuck. They had already tried twice and she confessed to having tried once with another boy. The visit to Max’s house was planned to correct this condition in a more leisurely fashion than was possible in the car. The expression Max later learned for what happened was— like stuffing an oyster into a parking meter. Milly subsequently confided she later was surgically stretched by the family doctor, a procedure Max imagined as requiring expanding plugs and screws. But at the time he took it all on himself.

  He did not then attempt sex with another creature until the summer of his junior year in college, 1962, in Munich. John had offered them each a car or a trip and he took the trip, thinking, correctly, that he would get the car too. Alone in Paris, in a madras jacket and a blue beret, he happened to witness a street crime and to be interviewed on camera. In Munich a few days later he saw the newsreel in a theater at the train station—with the beret, the appallingly familiar face, a French narration. He missed the train and waited for the short program to run through again. As the audience underwent a number of changes he noticed that certain men got up to leave and then sat down or stood in other places. It was this fact as much as seeing himself on screen that made him want to miss his train and stay. His face, made slightly ovoid by the fisheye lens, had just reappeared when a man in a dark suit and tie sat down beside him and pressed a leg against his.

  C’est vous là, n’est-ce pas? the man said.

  Max nodded. The man’s hand slid over and helped itself to a souvenir grope, to which Max acquiesced as if reluctantly giving an autograph. They had coffee together in the station, then went to a hotel nearby. The man held him close under the eiderdown. They did not actually have sex beyond frottage. Early in the morning a woman knocked loudly at the door, ranting in German. Amazingly, she used a passkey and came in, spitting like Mania from every balustrade. After an incomprehensible diatribe against the man, she turned and said something vile to Max in German. He replied, in Italian, that he did not speak German, at which instant the woman adjusted her language dial to Italian for a vicious and fluent string of insults and abuse; he was a troia—something like a slut— and perverted slime. Her nostrils flared and tilted upward in an attitude of fierce indignation and revulsion.

  They dressed and fled. When they came out of the hotel the man went one way and Max returned to the station, harried, fleeing the crime, boarding the next train, for the next stop on his tour.

  It had been clear to him since high school that all directions toward intimacy with men were strictly policed—all the mis- or half-understood expressions, gestures, symbols and rituals that represented sex and that, if pursued at length, might lead to it. For Max this meant the existence of a line down the middle of all his connections with men, a point beyond which it was forbidden, or at least dangerous, to go. For a long time it was possible to imagine this line as being rather far to the left of convention. He could pretend that everyone understood and appreciated the allure of men but chose not to respond to it for proscribed cultural reasons, just as he did. It was clear also that he had no choice in the matter other than the repression or manifestation of these desires, for they came unbidden; they could not be changed or altered, only repressed or disguised.

  It was in this mood of slightly paranoid circumspection that he passed his college years. By 1963, when he graduated, Jemm had moved quarters twice, changed its name to Mara Products, using John’s nickname for Marie, and lost two partners—Myron and Ellen—to the vicissitudes of business and friendship. The Desirs were by now nearly rich. The expensive years of college and weddings were behind them; everyone but Max was married and living elsewhere. First the house in Indian River was lavishly redecorated. Then they bought a second house at the beach, then a forty-foot fishing boat, also called the Mara. John joined the Naval Cadets, a national boatowners’ association that organized private cruises to Mystic and Newport and Lake Champlain. Every winter they went to the Caribbean on the Oceanic, John with three tuxedos and Marie with ten or twelve long gowns. Marie received jewelry and furs on her birthdays, Christmas and anniversaries. One Christmas, during the Vietnam War, they started opening gifts at nine in the morning and didn’t finish until after dark.

  THE DAY AFTER HIS GRADUATION FROM COLLEGE Max returned to Italy, to Florence, which he had seen the summer before, entering the city as if on the trail of closely interpreted clues left for him by something outside himself. He had come to write but arrived to find he had nothing to write about, that his ideas and experiences were banal and frivolous—frivolous in the wrong way. Each night, too warm and too exhilarated to sleep, he took walks through the narrow, benign, empty streets. Having done this twice, it became a ritual. Emerging into the Piazza della Signoria was like slipping onstage. Any number of operatic moments; as beside him, livid blood from the severed head of Cellini’s Perseus dripped on the marble bench. He made the connection between dissatisfaction over his writing attempts and the quality of his experience. He felt he had done everything wrong thus far and must start over. He had put himself in the wrong places, learned the wrong attitudes—about himself, so that he didn’t know who he was; about his education, so that he hadn’t learned anything; and about sex. At twenty-two, except for Louella, and in odd incomplete ways Milly, Scott, and Dee, he was still a virgin.

  On these night walks a number of men regularly presented themselves to him. One in particular was apt at any moment to appear upstage or over by the fountain, always at a discreet but interested distance. He seldom followed Max; however, Florence centrostorico was small enough to account for frequent and seemingly coincidental encounters. It was this person’s genius to play young tourists like piccolos. He waited and watched and when Max got up and came across the piazza to speak, he was not particularly surprised.

  They became friends of a strange kind, the kind that sleep together, not as an invention of their own but as a matter of local custom. That was how one met and expanded one’s circle in Florence. The man took him to a house just outside the city, where eight or ten of his friends had assembled after dinner, as the
y did every night somewhere or other. It was usual for someone to leave, pick up whomever he pleased, and return to liven the party; a little dancing, perhaps a striptease. The house was quiet and perfectly dark. Inside, several tall rooms had been lighted only with candles; five or six couples danced to soft music. It was not the senior prom. After introducing Max to the others, the man asked him to dance. Slowly, in little swaying steps, they turned, always counterclockwise, making one full revolution before Max realized they had been left alone, each of the couples having slipped out of the room behind his back. Another full revolution to demonstrate, politely, that they needn’t rush, then a kiss put them into a spiral that landed them on a pile of cushions on the floor, in a position of incipient coitus. It was not, he realized, an act that one did; it was something that occurred. He lowered himself onto ana somehow into the man in the same extended motion, in a way that then and ever after he thought of as miraculously easy and comfortable. The immediate senses were flooded to the extent that he failed to notice faces watching from the shadows, from around comers, behind the curtains, through the door.

  Coming home along the river afterward, he had the impression of stepping out of himself, as from behind a wall through which he had peered as through the false eyes of a portrait. Later, when told he had been observed, his embarrassment was mitigated by compliments and flattery, plus the feeling of having given and received erotic pleasure, somewhat alleviating the cheapness implied. Never mind; they spied on everyone sooner or later. It was a comfort to him, which they would never have guessed, to have at last done something worth watching.